Engineering complexity explodes as products become more complex, product cycle times become shorter, markets and manufacturing go global and customers demand more choices and customization.
Companies need a solution that enables them to manage this complexity, from product inception through manufacturing, in a simple way that enables re-useand commonality and eliminates engineering cycles on products that will never be offered on the market.
Teamcenter Product Configurator has been designed to address these needs through a variability backbone across the Siemens Digital Industries Software portfolio, providing a single, consistent definition of product features, rules and product content across a company’s entire product definition and execution process.
Product variability permits companies to offer good, better, best products to meet market needs at price points and feature levels that customers want, providing greater return on product development investments.
Complexity is a byproduct of increased product variability. Product complexity is growing exponentially due to market demands, technical complexity, corporate strategy, product/process variety, consumer demand, financial constraints and competitive pressure.
Product configurators play a vital role for managing this product complexity. With features allocated to products, and rules to govern their compatibility with each other, companies develop, maintain and grow product variants efficiently.
With Teamcenter Product Configurator, the variability definition is separated from the content definition, allowing the autonomy needed for configuration experts and content engineers to work semi-independently but still maintain a tight link where the two domains come together. Features defined in the configurator can be used to define variant content such as Bills of Material (BOMs) and CAD designs.
The separation additionally ensures that variability and rule definitions can be applied to multiple structures and across multiple domains such as requirement and system definitions, design, engineering, manufacturing and service.
A dictionary within the configurator provides a single, global definition of each product feature, and is used to define clear ownership and control. Based on market requirements, product planners add and manage features in the corporate dictionary and control the release and consumption rules for those features within a product family or across product families. Planners can allocate features for use in products and product lines along with rules governing usage of features. This dictionary enables quick summaries of where features are used and allows packaging of features into groups, making it easier to design, source and manufacture.
Take control of your product variants Addressing ever-increasing pressure to offer greater choice and variety in their products to meet customer expectations, Teamcenter Product Configurator enables manufacturers to specialize a product to their specific needs. The configure-to-order approach, which brings product specialization closer to the customer, is growing in importance. Using traditional processes, configureto-order can overwhelm resources with duplicated data that can introduce errors into product development. Teamcenter Product Configurator delivers a single variant management backbone that makes certain that all disciplines are working from a common understanding of product configurability.
Teamcenter Product Configurator not only allows all engineering disciplines to see and manage the overall product configuration needs but also enables each engineering discipline to manage areas of configuration unique to its domain within a common framework.
Utilizing early and continuous validation with real product data, issues can be identified and resolved long beforethey surface on the manufacturing floor. Manufacturing engineering then generates the Bill of Process leveraging the same configuration information that has been defined upstream in engineering.
Teamcenter Product Configurator has been designed to address these needs through a variability backbone across the Siemens Digital Industries Software portfolio, providing a single, consistent definition of product features, rules and product content across a company’s entire product definition and execution process.
The configurator automates the process of selecting different product options, so customers can select product options and interact with a visual representation of that item in real time. In other words, the configurator visualizes product options on the spot to help shoppers see what they are getting.
Rather than manually generating quotes and specifications, businesses use product configurators to automate this process, speed up the time needed to issue a quote, reduce errors, and dramatically shorten time to market. Product configurator software builds a smooth sales process and an improved customer experience.
A 3D product configurator is a way to let your customers personalize a product to their specifications. The added bonus of the 3D element is that it allows your customers to interact with your products online in real-time.
